what is your thoughts on Super Mario Blue Twilight DX, why was it called that, what was the behind the scenes development in it, how you reacted to it ended up being the one time a Mario fan game was on television? And last of all, what is your stance on Mario and Sonic fan games?
Well, there's actually kind of a developer's commentary feature as the final unlockable, I believe. I wrote a bunch of text. Though the save system is a little finicky, so I'm not sure who actually can reach that these days.
The name: The game originally released in 2003 called simply "Super Mario: Blue Twilight." I was recently asked if I had a build of this and I posted it on the internet archive. At the time, I was obsessed with Super Mario Sunshine. I didn't have a Gamecube of my own, but I was pretty desperate to play Sunshine. A lot of my game's features were me trying to approximate bits of Sunshine but for a 2D Mario game. Like, I could tell just by footage of Sunshine that Mario felt kind of "springy." So I tried to replicate that in my game.
I wanted a name like "Super Mario Sunshine", but there was kind of a rhythm to that name. It had a ring to it. I thought about Super Mario Twilight, but something about that didn't have the right kind of mouth feel. For whatever reason, "Blue Twilight" instinctually felt right. So I followed my gut.
(Actually, I wanted "MarioWeen" but that felt too silly. I still end up calling it that as a nickname.)
I tend to release games before they are ready. I think every game I've ever released comes out once, and then a little while later, the real version comes out where I fix a bunch of problems and add new stuff. So after the first release of MarioWeen, I was still feeling inspired. I came up with a handful of new levels, an extended final boss, and a brand new "true ending." And then I just kept piling secret content on top of that. Christmas levels, April Fools levels, the ability to play as Luigi, Luigi having joke endings, etc. That became Blue Twilight DX.
Getting featured on TV: my first knee-jerk reaction was frustration. I did not know my game was going to get featured. They did not tell me. To tell the truth, I had quickly fallen out of love with G4TV and I definitely did not like Attack of the Show. So I was completely unaware until a friend told me he saw my game on the show. Luckily, they aired each episode of AOTS twice: once live, and then they'd show a rerun of that day's episode later that night. So the second time around, I had a VCR ready and recorded it to VHS.
It was frustrating because I'm pretty sure I had my email listed in the game's readme file. They could have contacted me and been like "hey, tune in tonight." No such luck. This would have aired and completely passed me by.
It's honestly still hard to watch the recording. Impostor syndrome kicks in very, very hard watching this. Maybe worse than I've ever felt it in my entire life. The only time it feels right is when he complains about how hard the game is. Kevin Pereira complaining about how my game kicked his ass cast a long shadow on my entire game development career. Because I'd had some long arguments with my testers that MarioWeen was too difficult, particularly the true ending final boss and the Pumpkin King.
I dug in my heels. "These bosses aren't too hard," I said. "If I can beat them, anyone can beat them."
One of my testers was Mystic, in the days before he became the lead developer of SRB2, and before he was later ejected from the SRB2 team due to all the drama surrounding his tenure. Mystic loved very difficult games. The harder the better. At the time, he was making a hack called Sonic the Hedgehog 2Z, which primarily just made the game exceedingly difficult. The first versions of The Mystic Realm were also starting to take shape, mostly as an extreme-difficulty level pack for SRB2.
Mystic was the loudest voice that MarioWeen DX was too difficult. And even though I was confident that "if I could do it, anyone could," I knew that if Mystic of all people was raising red flags about the challenge level then maybe something was up. So I actually made Pumpkin King and the true Final Boss a little easier. I made hitboxes more forgiving, loosened up the timing of certain phases, that kind of thing. And Kevin Pereira still complained that the game was really difficult, on live television, broadcasting to a six figure audience. It felt kind of humiliating.
This is why, sometimes on this blog, and sometimes out there on the internet, I argue with people making hacks and fangames about difficulty. It's easy to get trapped in a toxic mindset of not wanting to reduce the difficulty too much because you want to prove something about yourself. Because you want to make a "real game" for "real gamers."
I was in those shoes. No, your game is too hard. Especially nowadays, when people have such huge backlogs and so many distractions. It's easier than ever before to quit a game and go back to Fortnite, or Roblox, or Warzone, or whatever. All it takes is one moment of frustration and they're never coming back.
On the flip side, people agree that most Kirby games aren't very difficult, and not only is that an ongoing franchise that's been around for over 30 years, it also lands near the top 50 best selling game franchises of all time. Similarly, people moan about how easy Symphony of the Night is, but it is also a deeply beloved game that co-founded an entire genre. When people say "Metroidvania," the Vania in question is Symphony of the Night. And I have consciously quit a lot more games for being difficult than for being easy.
I could keep going. I was going to do a video about this, actually. But all of this was crystalized by what happened with MarioWeen. If any developers are reading this: your game is probably too hard, and easy does not always mean "boring."
My stance on Mario and Sonic fangames: Well, I mean, I've been interviewed about this. First by a website called Cultured Vultures, and a second time by the longest running newspaper in France, Le Monde. Both times, I was allowed to post my replies in full here, so you can read the Cultured Vultures interview here, and the Le Monde interview here. The Cultured Vultures interview is shorter and less rambly, I think, but the Le Monde interview goes into a lot more detail about fangaming culture.
I think fangames are a necessary form of self expression, exactly like fanart, fanfiction, or even fan made music remixes. Takedown requests are harmful to the culture. Today's fans are tomorrow's star-creators. Your Christian Whiteheads. Your Ian Flynns. Your Tyson Hesses. Your Tee Lopes. That pathway needs to be cultivated, not strangled out of existence by fear and greed.
MarioWeen reminded me - it kind of rubs me the wrong way that a game like that wouldn't be received very well today. Ever since the advent of Game Maker, both the Mario and Sonic scenes seemed to get more and more ambitious and focus on imitating the games. While it's great that fans could now do that, the acclaim for that trend sort of reflected badly on games that didn't want to. The YoYoGames sandbox helped a bit, but with that shut down, we're back to "go big or go home". Thoughts?
I mean, I look back at MarioWeen and I don’t think it plays very well anymore. If I were to remake it today, and I made an attempt many years ago, I’d make it play more like a normal Mario game. Honestly, the picture I had in my head for how I wanted MarioWeen to play was pretty close to what the New Super Mario Bros. games ended up like, just with tighter controls.
I think you’re right insofar as a sense of experimentation is being lost in modern fan games. I know at the very least, that part of the reason there are “gaps” in what’s supported by Sonic Worlds Delta, is to try and encourage people to write their own code, but it also doesn’t work very well. People will just leave those gaps as-is, which leads to a lot of SWD fan games feeling extra janky.
It’s also lead to a lot of fan games that just feel... incredibly similar. Outside of the few “go big” games at SAGE last year, I can’t honestly tell you a lot of what I played, because a lot of it has been blending together for years.
At the same time, though... these frameworks allow more people to produce higher quality content with less effort, and I think that’s a net gain. Think of it in terms of, like... Super Mario Maker, right. There’s a lot of weird, wacky stuff people have made in Mario Maker. There’s a whole microcosm of streamers who play these incredibly intricate “troll” levels that are more akin to puzzle boxes. They just announced more than 26 million levels have been made for that thing.
And that’s a fixed system. You can’t change Mario Maker’s code. But you can change the code in Sonic Worlds Delta. You can insert new enemies. New artwork. New sounds. Most won’t, but most just want to make some Sonic levels. In some ways, I almost wonder if Sonic Worlds missed an opportunity -- by deliberately leaving certain elements unfinished (or half-finished) as a means to “encourage people to learn,” they might’ve been limiting their true audience more than anything.
And now, with the looming release of Sonic Studio promising “like Super Mario Maker, but for Sonic” the boat for Sonic Worlds being an easy way to just make Sonic levels has set sail.
I just remembered going through the Mario Blue Twilight extras and if memory serves, you wrote something like "my friends started calling the last boss Giga Bowser so it stuck." Did you genuinely not know what that was from at the time? Or is my recollection screwy? (I fully admit I didn't go back to check.)
It was long enough ago that I don’t remember the exact order of things, but I believe my brother sent me $100 for Christmas in 2004. I used that to buy a refurbished Gamecube and a copy of Super Mario Sunshine.
It was maybe even 2006 by the time I bought a copy of Super Smash Bros. Melee. I held off for a while because even though I wanted the game, I’d have to buy it brand new. Even if by this point it was on Nintendo’s $20 budget line, it was out of stock everywhere, and the few places that did have it were still selling new copies for $40. I finally stumbled upon a used copy of Melee for $35 at a Gamestop once, and begrudgingly realized that was the cheapest it was ever going to get. So that’s when I bought it.
The thing is, I don’t remember if the Giga Bowser boss was in the original 2004 version of Blue Twilight. I know he was in the 2005 “DX” version (obviously), which came out in August. Either way, it was likely the game came out before I owned Melee. Certainly before I ever got good enough at the game to even encounter Giga Bowser (which I think, to date, I’ve only ever done twice).
And you have to remember, in 2004 and 2005, Youtube was barely a twinkle in some dude’s eye. Nobody really owned capture cards outside of game press outlets or production studios. Giga Bowser was a known thing that existed in Melee, but it’s not like it’d turn up in your Youtube recommendations. Heck, you couldn’t even really find good, clean screenshots of that kind of stuff.
It was just harder for that kind of information to spread around. I may have been distantly aware of the name “Giga Bowser,” like maybe I’d seen it come up in IRC once, but I really had no idea what it was.
Have you made any full lengths game? I think you could make something cool!
It depends on what you mean by “full length game.” I have completed several game projects.
My longest game to date is probably Super Mario Blue Twilight, a fan game I made in 2005. That took me around 2-3 years to build, and was twelve levels and six bosses. You can download it on MFGG here, and you can watch me do a director’s commentary Let’s Play of it here.
A couple years ago, I participated in a Game Jam and made an original game called OverBite, where you play as Dracula and must chase down tourists that have infested his castle. It’s five levels long. Download it here, watch a director’s commentary Let’s Play here.
Hidden inside OverBite is actually a completely different second game, which I made back in 2012. It’s an arcade style game, so it just loops three levels indefinitely. You could theoretically play it forever, though I haven’t tested how well it holds up to extended play sessions.
I actually plan on doing a much larger, more feature-complete version of OverBite for Steam, but I’ve been too busy with a lot of other things. I haven’t forgotten about it, and just a few hours ago, I actually wrote down a new idea in to its design document.
In fact, I should probably re-write the design document because I’ve been scribbling down ideas in it basically since the Game Jam version of OverBite came out and it’s starting to become kind of disorganized and maybe even a little bloated.
I’ll get back to it eventually. I don’t plan on abandoning the project any time soon. It’s just that life and other commitments got in the way.
I also have more games that I’ve finished, but those two are probably the biggest and most complete right now.
Does any footage/screenshots exists of the Ghost Toad in Blue Twilight DX?
Probably! Not that I know of any, mind you. But they probably do. It is deliberately presented as something sort of mysterious and even kind of unmagical if you see it. I'm sure somebody probably screenshotted it in a "What's this?" kind of context.
It's been ages since I last used this but, Would you still happen to have the Super Mario Sunshine soundrips you used in Blue Twilight DX? I have been working on a lil' sound mod for SRB2 using sounds from the Adventure games (mostly just ported the ones from your old SA-SRB2 mod) but I also included support for Dirk's Mario character for the hell of it, wanting it to sound more "Gamecube-era".
Unfortunately I suffered a HDD failure earlier this year. And also a, um, everything failure.
Now I do have a version of my sound effects archive backed up, but I doubt I have the specific Super Mario Sunshine sounds or anything backed up. But that's because the archive I was using was very old and decrepit. I believe the Sunshine sounds I was using were recorded by some kid holding a mic up to their TV speaker.
Instead, I would recommend you give The Sounds Resource a look, which has fresh, clean, direct feed rips of sound effects from hundreds of games -- Dreamcast, Gamecube, the works. Voice files, too. You can't get much better than that.
I was just combing through the Super Mario Sunshine voice files a few weeks ago, actually. There's some fun stuff in there.
So Count Mario totally returns in OverBite, right?
It’s surprising to me how attached people got to the idea of Count Mario. A weirdly large number of people have come to me over the years talking about what was ostensibly a quick and dirty (and maybe even some what edgy) joke Mario joke character.
Back in 2012 when my desktop was dead and I was working off a dying laptop, when I was considering doing a “modern” remake of Marioween, one of the things I was honestly considering as a power-up was a suit that turned you in to Count Mario.
In some ways, I guess that could be considered the gestation for what eventually became OverBite. Not that the Vampire Suit (or whatever) would have played EXACTLY like OverBite does now, in fact I think I was planning on having it replace the same functionality of the bunny ears (flap to slow descent), but just more the idea of a… Dracula platformer, I guess.
And something I would have done in the game jam version of OverBite, had I enough time, was to make him flap his cape while gliding.
I’d put a Count Mario reference in the final version of OverBite but I don’t know if I could get away with anything, or if I would even WANT to try getting away with anything.
